The President doesn't need Congressional authority to negotiate a trade agreement. That power is assigned to the President by the constitution. So what is Congress really up to?
I've heard this bill relaxes the congressional approval that the Constitution requires. If so, the bill itself is unconstitutional, but you'd need a court to say so. And if it does relax the Constitutional requirements, it's an end run around the Constitution that no conservative should agree with.
The Constitution does not give the President Fast Track Authority. That is what this bill is for.
Respectfully, Ted Cruz would not do an “end run” around the constitution.
From the article I referenced above:
Like Reagan, Cruz believes in limited government, but his basis for that belief differs in a significant way from Reagan’s. Reagan thought limited government was a matter of political choice; Cruz believes it is a constitutional mandate. Cruz comes to that belief from a position of unusual intimacy with the constitutional text.
When Cruz was in his early teens, in Houston, his parents enrolled him in an after-school program run by Rolland Storey, a retired energy executive who wanted to instill the values of the free market in young people. At the Free Enterprise Institute, Storey had his young charges read Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek, and other authors revered by conservatives, and then give speeches at Rotary Clubs and similar venues around the state. “They created a spinoff group called the Constitutional Corroborators,” Cruz told me. “And they took five of the students, all of whom had been involved on the free-market side, and we focussed on studying the Constitution. So we’d meet on Tuesdays and Thursdays, for a couple of hours each night, and study the Constitution, read the Federalist Papers, read the Anti-Federalist Papers, read the debates on ratification. And we memorized a shortened mnemonic version of the Constitution.”
I asked for an example.
“TCCNCCPCC PAWN MOMMA RUN,” Cruz said. “Taxes, credit, commerce, naturalization, coinage, counterfeiting, post office, copyright, courts, piracy, Army, war, Navy, militia, money for militia, Washington, D.C., rules, and necessary and proper.”
Dan, you disagree with Sen. Cruz on the fast track, obviously many do. I respect your view. But, those who argue that Cruz would violate the Constitution, that’s just wrong. The guy lives and breathes the Constitution.